In Defense of a Category-Based System for Unification Admissions

Liberal societies typically prefer relatives and spouses of their members over other prospective immigrants seeking admission. Giving this preferential treatment to only certain categories of relationships requires justification. In this paper, I provide a defense of a category-based system for "unification admissions," non-members seeking admission for the purpose of living in the same society with members on a stable basis, that is compatible with liberalism and, in particular, does not violate the requirement of liberal neutrality. This defense does not commit liberal theorists to the traditional state sovereignty view on immigration, according to which societies have wide latitude to exclude immigrants as they see fit, and shows that, contra Ferracioli, societies are not required to treat relatives, spouses, friends, and creative partners of their members on a par in matters of immigration policy

Entry by Birth Alone?

This article argues that citizens have a basic right to invite family members and spouses into their society on the basis of Rawlsian egalitarian premises. This right is argued to be just as basic as other recognized basic rights, such as freedom of speech. The argument suggests further that we must treat immigration and family reunification, in particular, as central issues of domestic justice. The article also examines the implications of these points for the importance of immigration in liberal domestic justice and suggests avenues for further research on the interplay of considerations of justice towards citizens and non-citizens

Government pay and employment policies and government performance in developing economies

The aim of this paper is to offer a systematic examination of government pay and employment trends in developing nations. In section I, the difficulties inherent in analyzing government pay and employment policies are considered. Special attention is given to weaknesses in public expenditure theory and to the non-market character of government output. Section II highlights the problems generated by inappropriate government pay and employment policies. Most attention is given however to how government performance as a provider of goods and services is affected by inappropriate pay offers or the pursuit of independant government employment objectives. Section III presents the available evidence on recent trends in government pay and employment in developing nations. Movements in real government pay, wage compression, public sector employment growth and the wage bill are considered. Section IV offers a brief conclusion.Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Labor Management and Relations,Banks&Banking Reform,Work&Working Conditions

The size and growth of government spending

This paper reviews the size and growth of government spending. Section I surveys the empirical evidence on the growth of government expenditures. First, a number of measurement issues are raised, including the definition of the public sector, the appearance of off-budget expenditures, and the use of price deflators for government output. Section I then reviews available data on government expenditures for OECD and developing nations. Both a long term perspective, provided by several OECD economies, and contemporary experience, essentially since 1960, are presented. In Section II, the determinants of the growth in government are considered. This literature covers demographic demands for expenditure growth, the changing relative prices of public vis-a-vis private goods, the income elasticity of public goods, and the arguments of the public choice school. Most of these explanations have been directed at understanding trends in industrialized nations, and little has been written on the relevance of these explanations for developing nations. This section briefly speculates on the determinants of government growth in developing countries against the backdrop provided by results in the advanced economies.National Governance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Education for the Knowledge Economy,Knowledge Economy

Neural Networks for Predicting Algorithm Runtime Distributions

Many state-of-the-art algorithms for solving hard combinatorial problems in artificial intelligence (AI) include elements of stochasticity that lead to high variations in runtime, even for a fixed problem instance. Knowledge about the resulting runtime distributions (RTDs) of algorithms on given problem instances can be exploited in various meta-algorithmic procedures, such as algorithm selection, portfolios, and randomized restarts. Previous work has shown that machine learning can be used to individually predict mean, median and variance of RTDs. To establish a new state-of-the-art in predicting RTDs, we demonstrate that the parameters of an RTD should be learned jointly and that neural networks can do this well by directly optimizing the likelihood of an RTD given runtime observations. In an empirical study involving five algorithms for SAT solving and AI planning, we show that neural networks predict the true RTDs of unseen instances better than previous methods, and can even do so when only few runtime observations are available per training instance

Does Indonesia have a"low-pay"civil service?

Government officials and polcy analysts maintain that Indonesia's civil servants are poorly paid and have been for decades. This conclusion is supported by anecdotal evidence and casual empiricism. The authors systematically analyze the realtionship between government and private compensation levels using data from two large household surveys carried out by Indonesia's Central Bureau of Statistics: the 1998 Sakernas and 1999 Susenas. The results suggest that government workers with a high school education or less, representing three-quarters of the civil service, earn a pay premium over their private sector counterparts. Civil servants with more than a high school education earn less than they would in the private sector but, on average, the premium is far smaller than commonly is alleged and is in keeping with public/private differentials in other countries. These results prove robust to varying econometric specifications and cast doubt on low pay as an explanation for government corruption.Decentralization,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,National Governance,Knowledge Economy,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,NationalGovernance,Knowledge Economy,Education for the Knowledge Economy,Parliamentary Government